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TalkIQ raises $14 million Series A to give enterprises AI insights into voice communication

There's no shortage of startups building their brands around AI for enterprise.

There's no shortage of startups building their brands around AI for enterprise. And within the enterprise, few spaces are as competitive as AI-powered voice analytics. TalkIQ is the latest company in the space to carry home a large round of financing with promise. With $14 million in Series A funding, the TalkIQ team is hoping its proprietary tech stack and engineering-heavy team will give it a meaningful advantage selling to sales teams.

TalkIQ is bringing automatic speech recognition and natural language processing to previously unsearchable sales calls. With a focus on voice communication, the company provides near real-time insights into conversations as they happen. The platform can transcribe and flag key events in a conversation while retrieving battle cards on competitors when they get mentioned. TalkIQ also captures higher-level analytics that managers can use to get a view of what is working (or not) for sales teams.

Today's round is being led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Aspect Ventures, Danhua Capital, Felicis Ventures LINE Corp and Salesforce Ventures. That last one, Salesforce Ventures, is perhaps the most interesting because the investment is coming from Salesforce's new $50 million AI fund.

Though TalkIQ wouldn't get into too much detail about the role Salesforce will be playing in its go to market, it did admit that the company is a major customer expected to drive sales via deeper integrations in the future. Gven the shared customer profile between Salesforce and TalkIQ, the friendship makes a lot of logical sense.

And as far as I'm concerned it's going to matter...or at least it's going to have to matter. VoiceOps, Choras.ai, Deepgram, Gong and others have had products in this space for some time now. But in the enterprise space, everything comes down sales relationships -- so winning the affection of Salesforce may prove meaningful for TalkIQ.

Dan O'Connell, CEO of TalkIQ, remains confident that the accuracy and near real-time capabilities of his platform will set it apart in the long run. He says that performance starts with rejecting off the shelf solutions to machine learning problems and taking things in-house for more control. With a $7 million seed round and three and a half years of runway, TalkIQ has certainly had luxuries unavailable to others.